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Tesla crash victim had complained about auto-pilot in same location

330 points by ucaetano 9y ago

MBCook 9y ago
If he had seen this issue multiple times before why would he keep using autopilot in that area? That seems like a very odd decision.
- ucaetano 9y ago
  True, but let's not blame the victim.
  - joenathanone 9y ago
    He wouldn't be a victim in that case. If he had killed someone else in addition to himself, I'm sure you would be more keen on holding him responsible.
    - fwip 9y ago
      Still a victim even if he made a bad decision. Dude died.
  - gowld 9y ago
    The operator of a vehicle is responsible for operating it. Somewhere between 7-10 iterations of the same dangerous failure mode, it's time to stop betting your life that the failure won't repeat. > Walter complained "7-10 times the car would swivel toward that same exact barrier during auto-pilot." This still doesn't diminish Tesla's obligation to make their autopilot system behave properly.
    - debt 9y ago
      "The operator of a vehicle is responsible for operating it." But he wasn't operating it.
      - steve_musk 9y ago
        Well he should have been considering he was the driver...
      - testb 9y ago
        I think most of us would be more keen on not dying regardless of who is legally responsible
      - asdsa5325 9y ago
        But he should have been. Tesla's cars are not self-driving. The automated driving features are supposed to assist the driver, not replace.
        ForHackernews 9y ago
        Yeah! Isn't it obvious that a feature named "autopilot" means you have to watch it like a hawk, keep your eyes on the road and your hands on the wheel?
        Piskvorrr 9y ago
        Should be. Obviously people get their notion of "autopilot" from science fiction, not from aviation.
        MBCook 9y ago
        Which is why I’ve always maintained it was a very misleading name and would lead to dangerous accidents. Which it seems to have on a number of occasions. Of course people may have abused the system if it had a more sensible name anyway. But names competitors use like Automatic Cruise Control or SuperCruise seem much more descriptive of the system’s actual abilities.
        ghfbjdhhv 9y ago
        It’s a car, not a plane. Why is the definition from aviation more relevant than the definition from science fiction (which also happens to be closer to the plain English understanding of the phrase)?
    - totalZero 9y ago
      I think the point is that the guy passed away, and we gain nothing by asserting (based on our limited knowledge) that he lacked common sense. Tesla should improve its systems regardless of whether it was the first such error, the seventh, or the tenth.
      - MBCook 9y ago
        It’s a mitigating factor is Tesla’s favor. But mostly... I just don’t understand it. It seems like such an odd decision by the driver I don’t know what to make of it. It’s very unfortunate that he died, but that doesn’t mean we can’t ask questions/criticize what may have gone on.
    - sixothree 9y ago
      The lesson here is that Tesla does not take complaints seriously and someone died as a result. It sounds just as likely to me that another person using autopilot would have had the same issue at that location.
      - forgotmysn 9y ago
        While that might be the case, I'm not sure we have enough information yet to assume that's true.
      - Angostura 9y ago
        Or they had a team investigating why this combination of road features caused problems.
      - telchar 9y ago
        It's too early to draw that conclusion. Note that the claims in the article are coming from the family and haven't been corroborated by Tesla yet. It's possible they are incorrect about aspects of the story they're telling for various reasons.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - enraged_camel 9y ago
        >>The lesson here is that Tesla does not take complaints seriously and someone died as a result. That may be what you extracted from this incident, but it's definitely not "the lesson".
    - literallycancer 9y ago
      Holding the passenger responsible for what the car does sure won't be good for adoption.
    - eanzenberg 9y ago
      This is some intense libertarian leaning. Tesla of course is responsible. Their marketing is full-bore "Welcome to self-driving car country." They're selling the feature, they are responsible.
  - cornholio 9y ago
    It's not blame, he was simply dealing with a bug that was hard to reproduce in a production environment.
    - MBCook 9y ago
      That seems odd to me. If it happens so much how hard is it to have techs just drive a car through the area repeatedly on various days to get sensor data and reproduce it? If they only tried at the dealership and not the actual place... that seems like a big mistake on their part.
  - barrkel 9y ago
    Rightness is defined with respect to a system of rules. If being "right" leaves you dead, were you really right? Maybe in a legal sense, but is that the system that matters?
    - rdiddly 9y ago
      It's the one that matters for the rest of us who aren't dead!
      - barrkel 9y ago
        It's precisely because you're not dead yet that you should act rightly according to the correctly chosen system. I'm a biker. I can drive, but only ever drive rentals; motorcycles are my primary mode. A sense of righteousness for being in the right on a bike will get you killed. You ride within the margin of not just your own error, but also those of other road users, and your own machine, with your best judgement and risk preference tradeoff. If your machine has a known tendency to do something bad in some situation, you avoid that situation, even if you have someone else to blame. Blame doesn't keep you alive.
        bookofjoe 9y ago
        "A sense of righteousness for being in the right on a bike will get you killed." Well put. When I was a boy growing up in Milwaukee in the 50s/60s, there was a public service announcement on TV for the Wisconsin Dept. of Motor Vehicles that ended "Don't be dead right." I liked it then and find its lesson has stayed with me and helped me avoid trouble many times outside the driving space.
  - MBCook 9y ago
    I honestly worried about that when writing the comment. The car should have avoided it (based on Tesla’s usual claims). But Tesla and everyone else says the owner is still ultimately responsible because AutoPilot isn’t a 100% situation. If my car did something funky like randomly accelerate or turn hard at a given intersection and the manufacturer refused to fix it I’d stop driving through there. Why push your luck? I truly don’t like blaming the victim. I’ve been very critical of Tesla lately for their claims and safety issues. But I don’t understand this man’s decision at all. It doesn’t seem reasonable. I wish I knew why he kept using the system in that area. The ONLY idea I can think of is when the car got an update he would try again to see if it was fixed and of the tries was sadly the last.
    - lopmotr 9y ago
      We adapt to weird behavior all the time. I once found my brake pedal went right to the floor while driving. Then it fixed itself. I drove carefully after that but still kept using it. The other day my engine started revving up uncontrollably until I pulled over and turned it off. It's been fine since. I still drive it. Would you blame someone if their check engine light was on or the steering felt a bit wobbly?
      - toomuchtodo 9y ago
        Please get your vehicle looked at!
      - Baeocystin 9y ago
        100% serious answer- if what you are saying is true, and you do not immediately stop driving your car on public roads and take it to a mechanic for a thorough inspection, you are toying with both your own and other people's lives. Cars do not fix themselves, and brakes that drop to the floor are seriously compromised. The next time that happens, there may not be enough fluid left in the reservoir to repressurize the system. As for blame, the check engine light is for emissions gear, and will not effect safe vehicle operation. A wobbly front end, however, can indicate a serious problem, and yes, it is the driver's responsibility to operate a safe vehicle on public roads, and it would in fact be their fault if something happened because they did not perform proper maintenance.
  - UncleEntity 9y ago
    > True, but let's not blame the victim. I don't even think that even applies in this case. If TFA is correct and there is a problem in this particular spot and you still rely on autopilot then who is left to blame except the person who entrusted their life to a system known to be faulty?
  - twblalock 9y ago
    I'd definitely blame an airline pilot who crashed because he relied on autopilot in a situation he knew was not handled well by the autopilot. (I would also blame the autopilot.) I don't see why the driver of a car with any kind of semi-automated system should be held to a lesser standard. It sucks that the driver died, and it sucks that the Tesla autopilot system had problems handing that kind of situation, but that does not mean the driver is blameless. He put himself and the people in the cars around him at risk by using the autopilot feature on a stretch of road where he knew it did not work well.
    - mirimir 9y ago
      They typically are blamed.
    - asddddd 9y ago
      Are drivers trained to use these semi-automated systems?
    - veemjeem 9y ago
      If a plane crashes, the survival rate is pretty low. Most likely everyone on the plane is dead. People get into car accidents often enough to feel that crashing one's car rarely leads to death. Walter probably felt safe enough to use autopilot knowing that if the car crashed, he could still walk away from it.
      - greedo 9y ago
        Completely untrue. The survival rate for plane crashes is extremely high.[1] 1.https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NTSB_releases_statistics_on_aircraft_accident_survivability.aspx https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NTSB_releases...
        fourthark 9y ago
        Most of those crashes probably on the ground though?
        9y ago
  - smoyer 9y ago
    There are definitely times when the victim is to blame - in this case I think it's too early to assign blame to anyone (or anything?) so if your warning was against speculating on the cause of the crash, I'm in agreement.
  - Natsu 9y ago
    There's an old rhyme about that: "He was right, dead right, as he drove along, but he's just as dead as if he were wrong."
- JohnTClark 9y ago
  Maybe Tesla told him that the issue was fixed and he can use it again. Why do people trust auto pilot at such high speeds? It is still new technology. Let the autopilot park your car, if it makes a mistake the only bad thing that can happen is just a few scratches and in 5-10 years use autopilot on low traffic streets and then go to the highway. You can't expect new technology to be safe.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - heartbreak 9y ago
    > You can't expect new technology to be safe. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I expect all of the technology in my mass-produced car to be safe, where safe is defined as “will not steer my vehicle into a barrier at freeway speeds.”
    - theossuary 9y ago
      Great, bet your life on it then. I don't understand most people's perspective on this. It's like walking out in a crosswalk without looking; sure if you get hit the driver may go to jail, but you'll still be dead (or seriously injured). Use your own brain, you can't rely on others to keep you alive. At the end of the day you're the one with whose got the most to lose, always.
  - MBCook 9y ago
    If it’s not safe you shouldn’t be selling it.
    - tim333 9y ago
      Motor vehicles in general are not completely safe. It's a question of where you draw the line.
  - gowld 9y ago
    He took the car to the shop and Tesla said "Works for me, can't repro". > Let the autopilot park your car, if it makes a mistake the only bad thing that can happen is just a few scratches Or it can drive over a toddler or pin someone against a wall until they die.
- gnicholas 9y ago
  I imagine Tesla will make this argument in court. California is a comparative negligence state, so they can claim that some percentage of the negligence should be apportioned to him since he knew that the autopilot didn’t work great in this location. I’m not saying this is a winning argument, especially since he did so much to bring it to their attention, but just that Tesla would be expected to raise it. Of course, they’ll probably try to settle this quietly and hope that everyone goes back to worrying about the Uber self-driving fatality...
  - Robotbeat 9y ago
    And CalTrans for not fixing the crash attenuator (the man did not die instantly, so if the crash attenuator had not been removed, he likely would've survived.) And for making a confusing lane-like path right into the crash site. https://imgur.com/a/iMY1x https://imgur.com/a/iMY1x I mean, the crash attenuator had recently been used up, but the dangerous line situation that led to the crash which destroyed the attenuator had not been fixed.
- Cshelton 9y ago
  There is no evidence autopilot was engaged in this crash yet.
  - tim333 9y ago
    Update: There is now https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/30/17182824/tesla-model-x-crash-autopilot-statement https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/30/17182824/tesla-model-x-cr...
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
wjp3 9y ago
It'll be interesting to see if anything comes of the issue with the already-collapsed crash barrier and what CalTrans says about it. That sort of thing is there for a reason, and to be left in a crushed state for any period of time is bad.
- fludlight 9y ago
  I wonder how fast they replace crushed barriers.
  - iaabtpbtpnn 9y ago
    The crash was at the 101 and 85 flyover for the carpool lane. Next to that lane there is a sign warning of upcoming construction closures... in fall 2017. Does that answer your question?
    - fludlight 9y ago
      I would hope that removing a outdated construction sign is lower priority than replacing a spent crash barrier.
      - freehunter 9y ago
        It’s broken windows. If they can’t take down a simple sign three years later, how long does it take to reset a barrier that takes actual work?
    - cameldrv 9y ago
      Yeah, what's up with that? There's a sign you pass getting on 101 North from Oregon Expy that says that the ramp is going to be closed on some particular day in 2015.
    - Rapzid 9y ago
      It sounds like CalTrans had a lot of tolerance for shoddy work.
- deleted 9y ago
segmondy 9y ago
One of the things you learn in flying is not to force it. If conditions are not safe. Just forget about it. It almost seems the same type of judgement needs to be made for auto-pilot. If your auto-pilot acts up at all. Just turn it off and don't use it till it's resolved. All you need is one incident to be dead, so if you get a chance to observe any abnormalities, consider it a blessing. Something that will also be great will be a sort of "crash dump/bug report" button for these cars. If at any time your car does something unsafe, you can hit that button. The car will save the last 60 seconds so the manufacturer can analyze it to debug and figure out what went wrong. I was so excited about auto-pilot and dreamed of getting in my car and sleeping while it made cross-country trips. So much for that, that seems way far out.
- pooya13 9y ago
  >> One of the things you learn in flying is not to force it. If conditions are not safe. Just forget about it. I wonder if we would have had safe planes if that was the mentality when they were first invented.
- herbst 9y ago
  > I was so excited about auto-pilot and dreamed of getting in my car and sleeping while it made cross-country trips. So much for that, that seems way far out. This is more a hijack than a direct critique but I think the general issue is the assumption that we need a private vehicle for that. Trains are perfectly capable for bringing me from A to B while I am sleeping for years now. Edit:// with years I mean years. Before that pressure made longer rides usually more uncomfortable than they are now with modern trains. Probably only because my area has plenty of mountain tho.
  - nxc18 9y ago
    Not in the United States. Rail coverage is terrible. If you can get to your destination, good luck doing that without switching trains.
    - herbst 9y ago
jakobegger 9y ago
Previous discussion of this crash: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16694365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16694365
deleted 9y ago
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_ph_ 9y ago
One thing to remember in all the discussions about the accident is, that there is no information available whether the autopilot was active at the time of the accident.
- Cshelton 9y ago
  Came here to say this. It's unfair to start talking about autopilot mishaps in this case, and what this family is saying, etc. When there is NO evidence yet as to whether autopilot was engaged. Further more.. if the barrier was already hit previously by another car, as the reason why it was collapsed prior to the Tesla crash, this may simply be an area where the road is not designed very well and causes many human error in that location. This happens all the time. In fact, road design is a significant cause of vehicle crashes.
  - phkahler 9y ago
    I will LMAO if it turns out the barrier was collapsed the previous day by another Tesla on auto pilot. We only hear about the fatalities right?
- modeless 9y ago
  Tesla has just announced that autopilot was on during the crash. https://www.tesla.com/blog/update-last-week’s-accident https://www.tesla.com/blog/update-last-week’s-accident It sounds like they are saying the driver had 5 seconds to notice the problem and react. It is scary to think that when you are on autopilot you may be 5 seconds away from death at any time. Better not take those eyes off the road!
  - imtringued 9y ago
    If you take the human factor away 5 seconds ahead of time warning is quite a lot. The car could have slowed down to a possibly non fatal speed. By asking the human to act the autopilot is actually throwing away at least 2 of those precious 5 seconds.
CivilEngineer 9y ago
> He also makes a startling claim -- that before the crash, Walter complained "7-10 times the car would swivel toward that same exact barrier during auto-pilot. Walter took it into dealership addressing the issue, but they couldn't duplicate it there." Doctor! It hurts when I do _this_!
antirez 9y ago
"Our data shows that Tesla owners have driven this same stretch of highway with Autopilot engaged roughly 85,000 times since Autopilot was first rolled out in 2015. ... There are over 200 successful Autopilot trips per day on this exact stretch of road." Who wrote this statement does not understand software. If there is some kind of Heisenbug, those numbers are too small to prove that the software is ok, and actually the guy that died reporting that there was an issue there, and later crashing there, looks like a very interesting hint about a potential software bug that should be investigated. The Tesla statement is the equivalent of "works in my laptop" at a bigger scale. Also consider that 85k times since 2015 means that potentially only a fraction of those trips were executed with the latest version of the software. Moreover the street layout may now be kinda different triggering some new condition.
- shawn 9y ago
  Heisenbugs in AI are also interesting. As computers approach sentience, it will become progressively harder to explain their behavior. Why did you eat a bagel instead of eggs this morning? Usually there isn't a scientific answer. In the present, AI models are already so complicated that it seems hard to get reproducible diagnostic results, short of just saving every frame of data that the car's sensors pick up. And for video that seems rather prohibitive. Imagine collecting all sensor data for each of those 200 trips per day along the entire stretch of road.
  - buvanshak 9y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophic_interference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophic_interference >Catastrophic interference, also known as catastrophic forgetting, is the tendency of an artificial neural network to completely and abruptly forget previously learned information upon learning new information.
    - tensor 9y ago
      These self driving systems are not likely learning in realtime. When the algorithms are updated, best practice is to validate their performance on a large regression set. So something like this should be caught during validation, assuming your test data is good.
deleted 9y ago
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utopcell 9y ago
Why call something "auto-pilot" when it is clearly not remotely ready to do what its name implies ?
- Robotbeat 9y ago
  It’s an aviation term, and it does exactly what an aviation autopilot does: assist the pilot. They didn’t call it “self-driving” or “autonomous” because it isn’t those things.
  - domevent 9y ago
    It’s also a car, and not a plane. Do they also call the wheels propellers? It’s a misleading term for the majority of people who don’t fly their own planes.
- SteveCoast 9y ago
  Unless someone has ever used an auto pilot in something like a Cessna, that person would probably have a wildly overoptimistic idea of what an autopilot does. Even on a passenger jet it's really not that smart, there's just lots more volume to explore so it's hard to kill everyone. A better analogy would be cruise control. It controls essentially one variable. As does lane keeping. You combine a couple of these things and you think it's smart, and it isn't. We learnt this (edge cases between single variable trackers) ~40 years ago in aircraft, that there are places in the flight envelope that combinations of single variable trackers will still let you go, but will also kill you.
  - freehunter 9y ago
    There used to be the same problems with cruise control, though. People thought it would brake automatically and steer around corners, and would get into accidents that proved their assumption wrong.
  - drawkbox 9y ago
    Yeah autopilot is similar in airplanes to what autopilot is on Teslas. Not sure what else you could call it without it also being confusing. Autopilot is a tool to stay in your lane and prevent common scenarios like keeping speed, avoiding obstacles and keeping distance, though there are still possible edge cases like this one appeared to be that can be more dangerous than not using it as the systems are not fully autonomous. Even with airplanes, if something gets in the way, autopilot won't always save you and can only alert you when the situation gets bad i.e. oncoming airplane or obstacle, altitude, speed etc. We fly in planes with autopilot and we are safer for it, but pilots/drivers still need to be alert and operating the plane. Teslas aren't fully autonomous and probably can't truly be until everything is connected and more cars on the road are autonomous for expected behavior. I trust autopilot in planes but still want a pilot. Most likely autopilot will be more useful in large buses, trucks, shipping, boats, airliners than individuals as you will still need a driver most of the time. Even the Uber crash could have possibly been avoided with a more alert driver. One area that may cause more crashes in the interim is trusting the software too much, autopilot that does work six sigma 99.999999% of the time may lead to a possible issue of driver comfort with the technology that may still have edge cases that can endanger them. This issue was a factor in the Tesla crash and the Uber crash I think a huge overlooked part of the failure here was the previous accidents at this part of the road and the lack of repair. We have a serious infrastructure issue with disrepair, non automated/untracked driving of humans probably ends up badly in these areas but goes unnoticed or is suppressed as road design can be a big factor, this automated crash highlighted an issue here at this offramp/fork that probably would go unnoticed and cause more issues. If nothing else, automated driving will have the data to fix these bad areas of our infrastructure and double down on safety and protections.
devit 9y ago
Seems pretty inexcusable for a self-driving system to ever hit a static obstacle (while not trying to avoid another collision). There should be manslaughter charges for this kind of thing.
jijojv 9y ago
SW/HW Bugs happen - fact of life. More concerning is that Tesla denying this was ever reported to them... I had my driver side view mirror stuck issue fixed and they put in the notes that they re-filled all my tires during repair service allegedly as reqd. by some CA law. Later that week I got an alert that my tire pressure was low and had to get it air pumped so obviously they didn't do that despite having claimed to have done just that...
- CobrastanJorji 9y ago
  > More concerning is that Tesla denying this was ever reported to them. This is how Tesla reacts to all bad publicity. Bad review on battery life comes out? Data dump indicating the reviewer might've done something wrong. Accident? Statistical dump showing that most cars don't do this. I like this technique more than generic "we can't comment" responses, but I'm pretty confident they heavily cherry pick, looking for something that people who glom onto data can see and say "oh good, Tesla's right."
  - jackvalentine 9y ago
    Yup Tesla knows their audience - it's their semi-rabid owner and aspiring owner fan base. Throw out some logs or stats without context and let them do the dirty work for you.
dawhizkid 9y ago
Do you "feel" any responsibility as an autopilot ML engineer? I know a few that joined within the last year.
marcell 9y ago
Highway driving is supposed to be "easiest" problem for self driving cars to solve, since there are fewer edge cases, less turning, etc., but it's also the most dangerous type of driving. You are much more likely to die going at 65mph than 25mph. I think deploying self driving cars at <=25mph speeds at first would be wise. Personally, I wouldn't risk letting a car take over at high speeds until there is a longer track record of safety.
- ivanech 9y ago
  Many places with <=25mph speeds have pedestrians, and they're a lot more delicate than vehicles are. Drivers aren't the only ones at risk.
smoyer 9y ago
Am I the only one that thinks that drivers with auto-pilot and back-up drivers for driver-less cars should be ready to drive at any instant? As an engineer, I'm seeing these features as beta at best.
- sf_rob 9y ago
  The problem is that that's not how human cognition works. If the auto-pilot is working well your brain will inevitably become accustom to the lack of stimulus. Ironically I think that these systems have a kind of uncanny valley type area where they are probably safest when the auto-pilot is poor or great, but not in the middle.
  - smoyer 9y ago
    I understand that ... and that's another problem we've yet to solve. What you've described is what led to the crash of the Korean Airliner that undershot the runway at SFO a few years ago. In that case, they would have been better off letting the plane land itself but that's not SOP.
zamalek 9y ago
My opinion: EVs, self-driving or directed, need an ejection mechanism for their batteries. Petrol has the advantage that it may ignite, where batteries are almost guaranteed to when damaged. Ideally, it would be an active system (launching the batteries no more than a meter away) - but that could fail under the conditions which caused the damage to the batteries. An alternative would be a passive system made of materials known to melt when exposed to a lithium fire - providing a few centimeters of separation from the cabin. Either way, the current situation is not ideal.
- freehunter 9y ago
  So your system would throw a burning pile of lithium into the woods to start a forest fire, into oncoming traffic to cause another crash, into a pedestrian on the sidewalk, etc?
  - zamalek 9y ago
    You're right. It's a terrible idea. Pity it's too late to edit or delete that dumb comment.
- Diederich 9y ago
  I'm not going to dismiss your opinion out of hand, though I certainly don't agree with it. If I may: do you realize that, in this catastrophic wreck, that the fire only started, slowly, after the driver had been taken by EMS? One big difference between a fire with batteries and gas is this: if gas starts to burn, most likely all of it is going to burn, quickly and often explosively. None of these are the case with the batteries in Teslas. Only the damaged ones are likely to burn, slowly, and not explosively.
userbinator 9y ago
Walter took it into dealership addressing the issue, but they couldn't duplicate it there Why not get a mechanic to ride along with him to that location, perhaps with extra diagnostic equipment connected? I could see how a bug that is dependent upon being at that location would certainly not be reproducible somewhere else. Here's an automotive service booklet from almost 70 years ago which recommends the same thing for troubleshooting: http://www.imperialclub.com/Repair/Lit/Master/021/Page14.htm http://www.imperialclub.com/Repair/Lit/Master/021/Page14.htm
tytytytytytytyt 9y ago
He complained 7 - 10 times and then just forgot about how it used to swerve towards a head on collision with the median?
notafxn 9y ago
Super fun to compare the comments on this to the comments on the Uber accident.
- FSharper 9y ago
  Exactly. Lots of bias here. They aren’t deep thinkers.
anonytrary 9y ago
I can't believe this person kept using it. If I had noticed a bug in auto-pilot and complained about it, I would be way too scared to ever use auto-pilot again. Personally, I never use auto-pilot because driving is piss easy, as it's designed to be. Perfect self-driving cars is a nearly impossible feat to accomplish in an unbounded track. I can only imagine automated driving in a system which has no room for error. Examples include: tunnels under the ground, chain links on the ground (as in trolleys, trains, etc.), or anything else that vastly reduces the entropy involved in driving. With self-driving cars on current roads, it will probably take years to get from 1% error to .1% error, and decades to get from .1% error to .01% error, which isn't even good enough. Perhaps it will take a century or longer to develop the required artificial intelligence to make self-driving cars perfect "enough". There's just too much room for unique problems to spawn. Bounding vehicle freedom seems to be the only way forward.
- gameswithgo 9y ago
  i admit i immediately thought it was suicide-life insurance scam.
- WhompingWindows 9y ago
  Your numbers about error percentiles don't make sense. Ideally, you'd want an outcome measure like fatalities per million miles, accidents per 100k miles, not "% error" which is vague. Furthermore, look at the actual data we have right now. SDC makers actually put out data in California about their "disengagement rate" which is how many time the human drivers took over from the software. Waymo have steadily increased that rate over the past few years, now they are driving many hours without disengagements. Look at the link below, page 4, you'll see they have 63 disengagements over 350k miles. That's 1 per 5.5k miles, so these cars are driving for days without a human takeover. They will not need their own infrastructure, that would be not be economically viable. They will go on the roads we have or they won't go at all. Tunnels are going to be reserved for high-density point-to-point travel, if the boring company or others ever get scale...
  - anonytrary 9y ago
    Then let's add some perspective. You must be referring this[0] paper. If the average person puts on 1,000 miles per month[1], then that means they'd have to deal with disengagement (a mishap) at least twice a year, which is not acceptable for fully autonomous driving. I'm going to define a "fully autonomous vehicle" as "a vehicle which should not ever require me to sit in the front seat and control it under any conceivable circumstance". Put differently, I should be able to lay down for a nap in the back seat and wake up at my destination without any chance for disengagement during my entire lifetime. At the current rate of 1 mishap per 5,500miles, I would be dead after about 6 months. Assuming a human lives to 75 years (we should really be using 75years minus 16years, but it's unimportant), a lifetime of driving is about 1,000mi/mo x 12mo/yr x 75yr = 900,000 miles. I don't even want the probability of encountering a mishap to be once per lifetime, let alone once per 6 months. One mishap per 900,000 miles isn't enough, because, on average, I'd encounter one disengagement in my lifetime. Assuming we're striving for a world where 7 billion people can drive without a single incident in 75 years (a vast underestimate), we need the probability of a mishap to occur to be less than once per 7,000,000,000humans x 900,000mi/human = 63 x 10^14 miles. 1/5e3 is not even close to 1/6e15. We're talking about 12 orders of magnitude in our error rate. I'd say we're laughably far away from our goal. We've got a long way to go. [0] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/42aff875-7ab1-4115-a72a-97f6f24b23cc/Waymofull.pdf?MOD=AJPERES https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/42aff875-7ab1-4115... [1] https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/01/25/the-average-american-drives-this-much-each-year-ho.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/01/25/the-averag...
Skunkleton 9y ago
The fire seems pretty severe too. I wonder what caused the battery containment to fail?
SpaceEncroacher 9y ago
Crash victim? More like crash dummy, auto-pilot is raw.
lewis500 9y ago
I am pretty mystified why tesla is even running autopilot on their cars. They already have more demand than they can handle, and I don't think anyone buys a tesla because of the autopilot. They are opening themselves up to huge court claims at the same time they are low on money. Just keep running tests and maybe do a pilot for a few years. Isn't Waymo sort of in the lead right now? They aren't running their software on millions of vehicles but seem to be progressing okay. It seems all these companies are in a big rush and being slapdash. Maybe it's a disconnect between the engineers and the execs/shareholders. It doesn't even seem profit-driven...almost fear driven. ("we don't wanna be left behind.")
- sseth 9y ago
  It allows them to develop self driving technology without the expense of dedicated cars and paid drivers, and without any liability (because drivers take the risk).
animex 9y ago
The fact that it happened to him "several times" and not to others to me might indicate a specific hardware/sensor issue related to his vehicle. A sensor, slightly misaligned or not working to the same tolerance? Pure speculation, I know. Also the 200 trips/day refers to what? All Tesla vehicles? How about for his specific year & model and software version and configuration (both equipped and driver-defined)?
jaimex2 9y ago
They should rename autopilot to auto-scapegoat. There is zero information yet and its all everyone is jumping onto. Last week the same thing happened to a Tesla that wasn't even equipped with autopilot.
aerovistae 9y ago
I love Tesla to death and in most cases will defend them beyond the point of reason. But I took a test drive in a model S for the first time earlier this year and almost immediately noticed autopilot’s extremely unreliable behavior— it would swerve out of lanes in ordinary situations that should have been easy to handle. The second I saw that, hat was it: I would never use it again before many years of testing and improvement had taken place. No way am I gambling my life on a clearly incomplete feature just because it’s cool. Fuck that. Of course Tesla is fairly safe behind their disclaimers and warnings, and to be honest I think it may be impossible to develop such a system without putting it into the wild before it’s perfect. But for me, personally...I’ll let other people choose to be the Guinea pigs. The risks are all too obvious. Continuing to use the feature is very dangerous. Do it knowing this may very well happen to you.
- modeless 9y ago
  After Tesla dumped Mobileye for their own system a year or two ago, autopilot performance was worse. But in the past few weeks they supposedly pushed out an update that dramatically improved it, to the point that it's finally unambiguously better than the old Mobileye system. I still wouldn't trust it. I don't believe their current hardware has enough processing power to do the job. But it should be performing better now than even a few months ago.
- empath75 9y ago
  > Of course Tesla is fairly safe behind their disclaimers and warnings I don't think so. All it will take is a Tesla plowing into a sidewalk full of people, and no hand-wavy gesture at a license agreement is going to make the political and legal pressure go away.
- kwhitefoot 9y ago
  I have a 2015 Tesla model S and I have never seen the behaviour you describe. I use autostart a lot on the ground that it's good to have two of us paying attention.
  - kwhitefoot 9y ago
saudioger 9y ago
Tesla is very very very bad with PR when something goes wrong. Their response to this is awful.
cube00 9y ago
It looks like Status: WORKSFORME won't cut it in this brave new world.
hedora 9y ago
Am I the only one that finds it odd that a human also ran into the same barrier within 24 hours of the crash? Perhaps Caltrans is partially to blame. (Full disclosure: Their incompetence almost killed me a few times back in my I-880 commuting days)
- lazyjones 9y ago
  > Am I the only one that finds it odd that a human also ran into the same barrier within 24 hours of the crash? Source? ABC7 says the previous crash was 11 days ago (DUI...), the barrier just wasn't fixed immediately. http://abc7news.com/automotive/exclusive-i-team-investigates-why-caltrans-didnt-fix-safety-barrier-before-tesla-driver-died-there/3280399/ http://abc7news.com/automotive/exclusive-i-team-investigates...
markmark 9y ago
I really don't like autopilot. It's good enough to make drivers trust it and not pay attention, but it's not good enough to not kill people when they do that. And when there's an accident Telsa come out and say "the system warned the driver to put their hands on the wheel" or something similar. Unless a car can 100% self drive drivers aids should require the driver to have hands on the wheel and be paying active attention at all times.
- toast0 9y ago
  This is part of why I haven't considered a Tesla. If I get into an collision in any other manufacturer's vehicle, the manufacturer's PR team won't impune my honor in the court of public opinion. It seems like the Tesla autopilot is very similar in capabilities to other manufacturers' active lane keeping, adaptive cruise control and active collision avoidance braking systems, however the marketing and user behavior is much different. There's no expectation that a Pacifica with all the bells and whistles is going to do a good job driving for you with no hands, but if somebody stops suddenly, it will too.
- jackvalentine 9y ago
  Googling surprisingly didn't give me a definitive answer on this - how long does autopilot let you go before warning, and then before stopping the car if you don't have your hands on the wheel?
WillPostForFood 9y ago
The path into the barrier looks a lot like a lane. https://imgur.com/a/iMY1x https://imgur.com/a/iMY1x And the old striping is lightly visible as well.
- dixie_land 9y ago
  looks like that would trick a human driver under certain lighting conditions. between Seattle and Bellevue a stretch of freeway looks just like that and trips me over every time
  - cesarb 9y ago
    Either the same place or a nearby one (same pair of highways) did trick a human driver two years ago: https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/HAR1701.pdf https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/... "[...] when it entered and traveled in an unmarked gore area, rather than the intended high-occupancy-vehicle (HOV) lane, and collided with a crash attenuator. The 990-foot-long gore, with an unmarked inside area, separates the left exit HOV lane for State Route 85 from the US-101 HOV lane."
    - pacificmint 9y ago
      Not the same place nor nearby. From the picture on page 24 it's clear that this is the 85/101 interchange in south San Jose, about 20 miles away from the other 85/101 junction where the Tesla accident happened. The type of accident does seems comparable though.
  - taneq 9y ago
    From the article, it sounds like people crash pretty regularly in exactly that spot.
- r00fus 9y ago
  I'm amazed that the barrier doesn't have yellow reflective striping or any of those sand barrel thingies.
jijojv 9y ago
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/apples-steve-wozniak-doesnt-believe-anything-elon-musk-or-tesla-say.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/apples-steve-wozniak-doesnt-... "Man you have got to be ready — it makes mistakes, it loses track of the lane lines. You have to be on your toes all the time," says Wozniak. "All Tesla did is say, 'It is beta so we are not responsible. It doesn't necessarily work, so you have to be in control.' "Well you that is kinda a cheap way out of it."
- cup-of-tea 9y ago
  Unlike people like Elon and Jobs, you can safely calibrate your bullshit meter with Woz. He's not as famous because the press don't generally like that.
pmarreck 9y ago
IMHO, they need to get autopilot at least an order of magnitude better than human drivers statistically, before releasing this tech, because this sort of news is extremely bad public-perception-wise. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect a Tesla driver to always have his hands on the wheel during autopilot
godelmachine 9y ago
"Autopilots performance is unrelated to navigation" Tesla is mincing words.
Maro 9y ago
It's interesting nobody is asking why the crash attenuator was not replaced faster.
sjg007 9y ago
Certainly CalTrans is responsible for not replacing the barrier. Expect a lawsuit/settlement. Tesla will be found liable too, that’ll be a jury trial civil suit. Why? Despite reporting that AP failed at that interchange and despite still using it, drivers and juries expect safety features to work as advertised.
- static_noise 9y ago
  The autopilot is not a safety feature.
Bombthecat 9y ago
Side story, I have an open with crash warning. On a highway I think it even detects crashes ahead of you ( had once two cars in a three lane almost crashing while one car tried to switch Lanes) Well, back to story. I have a street where cars park left and right of the street like a zick Zack. There is one spot where it always warns me about a crash..
raverbashing 9y ago
The question is, if the driver was aware the autopilot was unsafe at that area, why did they keep using autopilot there? You can't just throw your hands on the air and hope for the best. Your car, you are on the wheel, you are responsible.
mdekkers 9y ago
before the crash, Walter complained "7-10 times the car would swivel toward that same exact barrier during auto-pilot ...and after 7 to 10 times , he still didn't learn his lesson? That's pretty stupid if you ask me. If my car does something weird at a particular stretch of road, especially 7 to 10 times, you can bet your bananas that i'll be paying a lot of attention on that stretch of road. If my "autopilot" (seriously, Tesla should stop using that name) isn't reliable in certain circumstances or places, then - guess what? - I WONT BE USING IT THERE. Why blame Tesla (I'm no Tesla fan), when the operator of the vehicle refused to operate it properly in the face of prior experience? Poor guy, and I feel for his family, but come on, what a dumbass
dotsh 9y ago
Why no one talks about other victims of car accidents and their is about 6k per month on average in US alone. But Uber and Tesla are on headlines when someone dies and there is like what 3-4 victims in total after all those years? It is not even worth mentioning.
- randomblob 9y ago
  I'd argue it is worth mentioning. People (rightfully) expect "Autopilot" systems to be perfect. Perfect meaning no fatal crashes, leading to passenger deaths.
- vasilipupkin 9y ago
  Miles driven, genius. There are millions of other vehicles on the road and not that many teslas
sabujp 9y ago
blame the customer, blame the govt, but your software is perfect Tesla?!
icc97 9y ago
Is there a specific system for traffic sign detection? I'd have thought you could have a system that is dedicated to spotting traffic signs in the current country with a significantly higher accuracy than cat detection. Even a small part of a sign should be enough. They're designed to be easy to spot. It seems like we just set neural networks up to recognise all objects and assume they'll recognise simple objects too. However typically how humans learn is through simple cartoons first and then layer on top of that rather than the other way round. Edit: should have done some googling before opening my mouth [0] [1] [0]: https://amundtveit.com/2017/07/13/traffic-sign-detection-with-convolutional-neural-networks/ https://amundtveit.com/2017/07/13/traffic-sign-detection-wit... [1]: http://www.bartlab.org/Dr.%20Jackrit's%20Papers/ney/1.TRAFFIC_SIGN_Lorsakul_ISR.pdf http://www.bartlab.org/Dr.%20Jackrit's%20Papers/ney/1.TRAFFI...

330 points by ucaetano 9y ago

If he had seen this issue multiple times before why would he keep using autopilot in that area? That seems like a very odd decision.

ucaetano 9y ago
True, but let's not blame the victim.
- joenathanone 9y ago
  He wouldn't be a victim in that case. If he had killed someone else in addition to himself, I'm sure you would be more keen on holding him responsible.
  - fwip 9y ago
    Still a victim even if he made a bad decision. Dude died.
- gowld 9y ago
  The operator of a vehicle is responsible for operating it. Somewhere between 7-10 iterations of the same dangerous failure mode, it's time to stop betting your life that the failure won't repeat. > Walter complained "7-10 times the car would swivel toward that same exact barrier during auto-pilot." This still doesn't diminish Tesla's obligation to make their autopilot system behave properly.
  - debt 9y ago
    "The operator of a vehicle is responsible for operating it." But he wasn't operating it.
    - steve_musk 9y ago
      Well he should have been considering he was the driver...
    - testb 9y ago
      I think most of us would be more keen on not dying regardless of who is legally responsible
    - asdsa5325 9y ago
      But he should have been. Tesla's cars are not self-driving. The automated driving features are supposed to assist the driver, not replace.
      - ForHackernews 9y ago
        Yeah! Isn't it obvious that a feature named "autopilot" means you have to watch it like a hawk, keep your eyes on the road and your hands on the wheel?
        Piskvorrr 9y ago
        Should be. Obviously people get their notion of "autopilot" from science fiction, not from aviation.
        MBCook 9y ago
        Which is why I’ve always maintained it was a very misleading name and would lead to dangerous accidents. Which it seems to have on a number of occasions. Of course people may have abused the system if it had a more sensible name anyway. But names competitors use like Automatic Cruise Control or SuperCruise seem much more descriptive of the system’s actual abilities.
        ghfbjdhhv 9y ago
        It’s a car, not a plane. Why is the definition from aviation more relevant than the definition from science fiction (which also happens to be closer to the plain English understanding of the phrase)?
  - totalZero 9y ago
    I think the point is that the guy passed away, and we gain nothing by asserting (based on our limited knowledge) that he lacked common sense. Tesla should improve its systems regardless of whether it was the first such error, the seventh, or the tenth.
    - MBCook 9y ago
      It’s a mitigating factor is Tesla’s favor. But mostly... I just don’t understand it. It seems like such an odd decision by the driver I don’t know what to make of it. It’s very unfortunate that he died, but that doesn’t mean we can’t ask questions/criticize what may have gone on.
  - sixothree 9y ago
    The lesson here is that Tesla does not take complaints seriously and someone died as a result. It sounds just as likely to me that another person using autopilot would have had the same issue at that location.
    - forgotmysn 9y ago
      While that might be the case, I'm not sure we have enough information yet to assume that's true.
    - Angostura 9y ago
      Or they had a team investigating why this combination of road features caused problems.
    - telchar 9y ago
      It's too early to draw that conclusion. Note that the claims in the article are coming from the family and haven't been corroborated by Tesla yet. It's possible they are incorrect about aspects of the story they're telling for various reasons.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    - enraged_camel 9y ago
      >>The lesson here is that Tesla does not take complaints seriously and someone died as a result. That may be what you extracted from this incident, but it's definitely not "the lesson".
  - literallycancer 9y ago
    Holding the passenger responsible for what the car does sure won't be good for adoption.
  - eanzenberg 9y ago
    This is some intense libertarian leaning. Tesla of course is responsible. Their marketing is full-bore "Welcome to self-driving car country." They're selling the feature, they are responsible.
- cornholio 9y ago
  It's not blame, he was simply dealing with a bug that was hard to reproduce in a production environment.
  - MBCook 9y ago
    That seems odd to me. If it happens so much how hard is it to have techs just drive a car through the area repeatedly on various days to get sensor data and reproduce it? If they only tried at the dealership and not the actual place... that seems like a big mistake on their part.
- barrkel 9y ago
  Rightness is defined with respect to a system of rules. If being "right" leaves you dead, were you really right? Maybe in a legal sense, but is that the system that matters?
  - rdiddly 9y ago
    It's the one that matters for the rest of us who aren't dead!
    - barrkel 9y ago
      It's precisely because you're not dead yet that you should act rightly according to the correctly chosen system. I'm a biker. I can drive, but only ever drive rentals; motorcycles are my primary mode. A sense of righteousness for being in the right on a bike will get you killed. You ride within the margin of not just your own error, but also those of other road users, and your own machine, with your best judgement and risk preference tradeoff. If your machine has a known tendency to do something bad in some situation, you avoid that situation, even if you have someone else to blame. Blame doesn't keep you alive.
      - bookofjoe 9y ago
        "A sense of righteousness for being in the right on a bike will get you killed." Well put. When I was a boy growing up in Milwaukee in the 50s/60s, there was a public service announcement on TV for the Wisconsin Dept. of Motor Vehicles that ended "Don't be dead right." I liked it then and find its lesson has stayed with me and helped me avoid trouble many times outside the driving space.
- MBCook 9y ago
  I honestly worried about that when writing the comment. The car should have avoided it (based on Tesla’s usual claims). But Tesla and everyone else says the owner is still ultimately responsible because AutoPilot isn’t a 100% situation. If my car did something funky like randomly accelerate or turn hard at a given intersection and the manufacturer refused to fix it I’d stop driving through there. Why push your luck? I truly don’t like blaming the victim. I’ve been very critical of Tesla lately for their claims and safety issues. But I don’t understand this man’s decision at all. It doesn’t seem reasonable. I wish I knew why he kept using the system in that area. The ONLY idea I can think of is when the car got an update he would try again to see if it was fixed and of the tries was sadly the last.
  - lopmotr 9y ago
    We adapt to weird behavior all the time. I once found my brake pedal went right to the floor while driving. Then it fixed itself. I drove carefully after that but still kept using it. The other day my engine started revving up uncontrollably until I pulled over and turned it off. It's been fine since. I still drive it. Would you blame someone if their check engine light was on or the steering felt a bit wobbly?
    - toomuchtodo 9y ago
      Please get your vehicle looked at!
    - Baeocystin 9y ago
      100% serious answer- if what you are saying is true, and you do not immediately stop driving your car on public roads and take it to a mechanic for a thorough inspection, you are toying with both your own and other people's lives. Cars do not fix themselves, and brakes that drop to the floor are seriously compromised. The next time that happens, there may not be enough fluid left in the reservoir to repressurize the system. As for blame, the check engine light is for emissions gear, and will not effect safe vehicle operation. A wobbly front end, however, can indicate a serious problem, and yes, it is the driver's responsibility to operate a safe vehicle on public roads, and it would in fact be their fault if something happened because they did not perform proper maintenance.
- UncleEntity 9y ago
  > True, but let's not blame the victim. I don't even think that even applies in this case. If TFA is correct and there is a problem in this particular spot and you still rely on autopilot then who is left to blame except the person who entrusted their life to a system known to be faulty?
- twblalock 9y ago
  I'd definitely blame an airline pilot who crashed because he relied on autopilot in a situation he knew was not handled well by the autopilot. (I would also blame the autopilot.) I don't see why the driver of a car with any kind of semi-automated system should be held to a lesser standard. It sucks that the driver died, and it sucks that the Tesla autopilot system had problems handing that kind of situation, but that does not mean the driver is blameless. He put himself and the people in the cars around him at risk by using the autopilot feature on a stretch of road where he knew it did not work well.
  - mirimir 9y ago
    They typically are blamed.
  - asddddd 9y ago
    Are drivers trained to use these semi-automated systems?
  - veemjeem 9y ago
    If a plane crashes, the survival rate is pretty low. Most likely everyone on the plane is dead. People get into car accidents often enough to feel that crashing one's car rarely leads to death. Walter probably felt safe enough to use autopilot knowing that if the car crashed, he could still walk away from it.
    - greedo 9y ago
      Completely untrue. The survival rate for plane crashes is extremely high.[1] 1.https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NTSB_releases_statistics_on_aircraft_accident_survivability.aspx https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NTSB_releases...
      - fourthark 9y ago
        Most of those crashes probably on the ground though?
      - 9y ago
- smoyer 9y ago
  There are definitely times when the victim is to blame - in this case I think it's too early to assign blame to anyone (or anything?) so if your warning was against speculating on the cause of the crash, I'm in agreement.
- Natsu 9y ago
  There's an old rhyme about that: "He was right, dead right, as he drove along, but he's just as dead as if he were wrong."
JohnTClark 9y ago
Maybe Tesla told him that the issue was fixed and he can use it again. Why do people trust auto pilot at such high speeds? It is still new technology. Let the autopilot park your car, if it makes a mistake the only bad thing that can happen is just a few scratches and in 5-10 years use autopilot on low traffic streets and then go to the highway. You can't expect new technology to be safe.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- heartbreak 9y ago
  > You can't expect new technology to be safe. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I expect all of the technology in my mass-produced car to be safe, where safe is defined as “will not steer my vehicle into a barrier at freeway speeds.”
  - theossuary 9y ago
    Great, bet your life on it then. I don't understand most people's perspective on this. It's like walking out in a crosswalk without looking; sure if you get hit the driver may go to jail, but you'll still be dead (or seriously injured). Use your own brain, you can't rely on others to keep you alive. At the end of the day you're the one with whose got the most to lose, always.
- MBCook 9y ago
  If it’s not safe you shouldn’t be selling it.
  - tim333 9y ago
    Motor vehicles in general are not completely safe. It's a question of where you draw the line.
- gowld 9y ago
  He took the car to the shop and Tesla said "Works for me, can't repro". > Let the autopilot park your car, if it makes a mistake the only bad thing that can happen is just a few scratches Or it can drive over a toddler or pin someone against a wall until they die.
gnicholas 9y ago
I imagine Tesla will make this argument in court. California is a comparative negligence state, so they can claim that some percentage of the negligence should be apportioned to him since he knew that the autopilot didn’t work great in this location. I’m not saying this is a winning argument, especially since he did so much to bring it to their attention, but just that Tesla would be expected to raise it. Of course, they’ll probably try to settle this quietly and hope that everyone goes back to worrying about the Uber self-driving fatality...
- Robotbeat 9y ago
  And CalTrans for not fixing the crash attenuator (the man did not die instantly, so if the crash attenuator had not been removed, he likely would've survived.) And for making a confusing lane-like path right into the crash site. https://imgur.com/a/iMY1x https://imgur.com/a/iMY1x I mean, the crash attenuator had recently been used up, but the dangerous line situation that led to the crash which destroyed the attenuator had not been fixed.
Cshelton 9y ago
There is no evidence autopilot was engaged in this crash yet.
- tim333 9y ago
  Update: There is now https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/30/17182824/tesla-model-x-crash-autopilot-statement https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/30/17182824/tesla-model-x-cr...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

wjp3 9y ago

It'll be interesting to see if anything comes of the issue with the already-collapsed crash barrier and what CalTrans says about it. That sort of thing is there for a reason, and to be left in a crushed state for any period of time is bad.

fludlight 9y ago
I wonder how fast they replace crushed barriers.
- iaabtpbtpnn 9y ago
  The crash was at the 101 and 85 flyover for the carpool lane. Next to that lane there is a sign warning of upcoming construction closures... in fall 2017. Does that answer your question?
  - fludlight 9y ago
    I would hope that removing a outdated construction sign is lower priority than replacing a spent crash barrier.
    - freehunter 9y ago
      It’s broken windows. If they can’t take down a simple sign three years later, how long does it take to reset a barrier that takes actual work?
  - cameldrv 9y ago
    Yeah, what's up with that? There's a sign you pass getting on 101 North from Oregon Expy that says that the ramp is going to be closed on some particular day in 2015.
  - Rapzid 9y ago
    It sounds like CalTrans had a lot of tolerance for shoddy work.
deleted 9y ago

segmondy 9y ago

One of the things you learn in flying is not to force it. If conditions are not safe. Just forget about it. It almost seems the same type of judgement needs to be made for auto-pilot. If your auto-pilot acts up at all. Just turn it off and don't use it till it's resolved. All you need is one incident to be dead, so if you get a chance to observe any abnormalities, consider it a blessing. Something that will also be great will be a sort of "crash dump/bug report" button for these cars. If at any time your car does something unsafe, you can hit that button. The car will save the last 60 seconds so the manufacturer can analyze it to debug and figure out what went wrong. I was so excited about auto-pilot and dreamed of getting in my car and sleeping while it made cross-country trips. So much for that, that seems way far out.

pooya13 9y ago
>> One of the things you learn in flying is not to force it. If conditions are not safe. Just forget about it. I wonder if we would have had safe planes if that was the mentality when they were first invented.
herbst 9y ago
> I was so excited about auto-pilot and dreamed of getting in my car and sleeping while it made cross-country trips. So much for that, that seems way far out. This is more a hijack than a direct critique but I think the general issue is the assumption that we need a private vehicle for that. Trains are perfectly capable for bringing me from A to B while I am sleeping for years now. Edit:// with years I mean years. Before that pressure made longer rides usually more uncomfortable than they are now with modern trains. Probably only because my area has plenty of mountain tho.
- nxc18 9y ago
  Not in the United States. Rail coverage is terrible. If you can get to your destination, good luck doing that without switching trains.
  - herbst 9y ago

jakobegger 9y ago

Previous discussion of this crash: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16694365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16694365

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

_ph_ 9y ago

One thing to remember in all the discussions about the accident is, that there is no information available whether the autopilot was active at the time of the accident.

Cshelton 9y ago
Came here to say this. It's unfair to start talking about autopilot mishaps in this case, and what this family is saying, etc. When there is NO evidence yet as to whether autopilot was engaged. Further more.. if the barrier was already hit previously by another car, as the reason why it was collapsed prior to the Tesla crash, this may simply be an area where the road is not designed very well and causes many human error in that location. This happens all the time. In fact, road design is a significant cause of vehicle crashes.
- phkahler 9y ago
  I will LMAO if it turns out the barrier was collapsed the previous day by another Tesla on auto pilot. We only hear about the fatalities right?
modeless 9y ago
Tesla has just announced that autopilot was on during the crash. https://www.tesla.com/blog/update-last-week’s-accident https://www.tesla.com/blog/update-last-week’s-accident It sounds like they are saying the driver had 5 seconds to notice the problem and react. It is scary to think that when you are on autopilot you may be 5 seconds away from death at any time. Better not take those eyes off the road!
- imtringued 9y ago
  If you take the human factor away 5 seconds ahead of time warning is quite a lot. The car could have slowed down to a possibly non fatal speed. By asking the human to act the autopilot is actually throwing away at least 2 of those precious 5 seconds.

CivilEngineer 9y ago

> He also makes a startling claim -- that before the crash, Walter complained "7-10 times the car would swivel toward that same exact barrier during auto-pilot. Walter took it into dealership addressing the issue, but they couldn't duplicate it there." Doctor! It hurts when I do _this_!

antirez 9y ago

"Our data shows that Tesla owners have driven this same stretch of highway with Autopilot engaged roughly 85,000 times since Autopilot was first rolled out in 2015. ... There are over 200 successful Autopilot trips per day on this exact stretch of road." Who wrote this statement does not understand software. If there is some kind of Heisenbug, those numbers are too small to prove that the software is ok, and actually the guy that died reporting that there was an issue there, and later crashing there, looks like a very interesting hint about a potential software bug that should be investigated. The Tesla statement is the equivalent of "works in my laptop" at a bigger scale. Also consider that 85k times since 2015 means that potentially only a fraction of those trips were executed with the latest version of the software. Moreover the street layout may now be kinda different triggering some new condition.

shawn 9y ago
Heisenbugs in AI are also interesting. As computers approach sentience, it will become progressively harder to explain their behavior. Why did you eat a bagel instead of eggs this morning? Usually there isn't a scientific answer. In the present, AI models are already so complicated that it seems hard to get reproducible diagnostic results, short of just saving every frame of data that the car's sensors pick up. And for video that seems rather prohibitive. Imagine collecting all sensor data for each of those 200 trips per day along the entire stretch of road.
- buvanshak 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophic_interference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophic_interference >Catastrophic interference, also known as catastrophic forgetting, is the tendency of an artificial neural network to completely and abruptly forget previously learned information upon learning new information.
  - tensor 9y ago
    These self driving systems are not likely learning in realtime. When the algorithms are updated, best practice is to validate their performance on a large regression set. So something like this should be caught during validation, assuming your test data is good.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

utopcell 9y ago

Why call something "auto-pilot" when it is clearly not remotely ready to do what its name implies ?

Robotbeat 9y ago
It’s an aviation term, and it does exactly what an aviation autopilot does: assist the pilot. They didn’t call it “self-driving” or “autonomous” because it isn’t those things.
- domevent 9y ago
  It’s also a car, and not a plane. Do they also call the wheels propellers? It’s a misleading term for the majority of people who don’t fly their own planes.
SteveCoast 9y ago
Unless someone has ever used an auto pilot in something like a Cessna, that person would probably have a wildly overoptimistic idea of what an autopilot does. Even on a passenger jet it's really not that smart, there's just lots more volume to explore so it's hard to kill everyone. A better analogy would be cruise control. It controls essentially one variable. As does lane keeping. You combine a couple of these things and you think it's smart, and it isn't. We learnt this (edge cases between single variable trackers) ~40 years ago in aircraft, that there are places in the flight envelope that combinations of single variable trackers will still let you go, but will also kill you.
- freehunter 9y ago
  There used to be the same problems with cruise control, though. People thought it would brake automatically and steer around corners, and would get into accidents that proved their assumption wrong.
- drawkbox 9y ago
  Yeah autopilot is similar in airplanes to what autopilot is on Teslas. Not sure what else you could call it without it also being confusing. Autopilot is a tool to stay in your lane and prevent common scenarios like keeping speed, avoiding obstacles and keeping distance, though there are still possible edge cases like this one appeared to be that can be more dangerous than not using it as the systems are not fully autonomous. Even with airplanes, if something gets in the way, autopilot won't always save you and can only alert you when the situation gets bad i.e. oncoming airplane or obstacle, altitude, speed etc. We fly in planes with autopilot and we are safer for it, but pilots/drivers still need to be alert and operating the plane. Teslas aren't fully autonomous and probably can't truly be until everything is connected and more cars on the road are autonomous for expected behavior. I trust autopilot in planes but still want a pilot. Most likely autopilot will be more useful in large buses, trucks, shipping, boats, airliners than individuals as you will still need a driver most of the time. Even the Uber crash could have possibly been avoided with a more alert driver. One area that may cause more crashes in the interim is trusting the software too much, autopilot that does work six sigma 99.999999% of the time may lead to a possible issue of driver comfort with the technology that may still have edge cases that can endanger them. This issue was a factor in the Tesla crash and the Uber crash I think a huge overlooked part of the failure here was the previous accidents at this part of the road and the lack of repair. We have a serious infrastructure issue with disrepair, non automated/untracked driving of humans probably ends up badly in these areas but goes unnoticed or is suppressed as road design can be a big factor, this automated crash highlighted an issue here at this offramp/fork that probably would go unnoticed and cause more issues. If nothing else, automated driving will have the data to fix these bad areas of our infrastructure and double down on safety and protections.

devit 9y ago

Seems pretty inexcusable for a self-driving system to ever hit a static obstacle (while not trying to avoid another collision). There should be manslaughter charges for this kind of thing.

jijojv 9y ago

SW/HW Bugs happen - fact of life. More concerning is that Tesla denying this was ever reported to them... I had my driver side view mirror stuck issue fixed and they put in the notes that they re-filled all my tires during repair service allegedly as reqd. by some CA law. Later that week I got an alert that my tire pressure was low and had to get it air pumped so obviously they didn't do that despite having claimed to have done just that...

CobrastanJorji 9y ago
> More concerning is that Tesla denying this was ever reported to them. This is how Tesla reacts to all bad publicity. Bad review on battery life comes out? Data dump indicating the reviewer might've done something wrong. Accident? Statistical dump showing that most cars don't do this. I like this technique more than generic "we can't comment" responses, but I'm pretty confident they heavily cherry pick, looking for something that people who glom onto data can see and say "oh good, Tesla's right."
- jackvalentine 9y ago
  Yup Tesla knows their audience - it's their semi-rabid owner and aspiring owner fan base. Throw out some logs or stats without context and let them do the dirty work for you.

dawhizkid 9y ago

Do you "feel" any responsibility as an autopilot ML engineer? I know a few that joined within the last year.

marcell 9y ago

Highway driving is supposed to be "easiest" problem for self driving cars to solve, since there are fewer edge cases, less turning, etc., but it's also the most dangerous type of driving. You are much more likely to die going at 65mph than 25mph. I think deploying self driving cars at <=25mph speeds at first would be wise. Personally, I wouldn't risk letting a car take over at high speeds until there is a longer track record of safety.

ivanech 9y ago
Many places with <=25mph speeds have pedestrians, and they're a lot more delicate than vehicles are. Drivers aren't the only ones at risk.

smoyer 9y ago

Am I the only one that thinks that drivers with auto-pilot and back-up drivers for driver-less cars should be ready to drive at any instant? As an engineer, I'm seeing these features as beta at best.

sf_rob 9y ago
The problem is that that's not how human cognition works. If the auto-pilot is working well your brain will inevitably become accustom to the lack of stimulus. Ironically I think that these systems have a kind of uncanny valley type area where they are probably safest when the auto-pilot is poor or great, but not in the middle.
- smoyer 9y ago
  I understand that ... and that's another problem we've yet to solve. What you've described is what led to the crash of the Korean Airliner that undershot the runway at SFO a few years ago. In that case, they would have been better off letting the plane land itself but that's not SOP.

zamalek 9y ago

My opinion: EVs, self-driving or directed, need an ejection mechanism for their batteries. Petrol has the advantage that it may ignite, where batteries are almost guaranteed to when damaged. Ideally, it would be an active system (launching the batteries no more than a meter away) - but that could fail under the conditions which caused the damage to the batteries. An alternative would be a passive system made of materials known to melt when exposed to a lithium fire - providing a few centimeters of separation from the cabin. Either way, the current situation is not ideal.

freehunter 9y ago
So your system would throw a burning pile of lithium into the woods to start a forest fire, into oncoming traffic to cause another crash, into a pedestrian on the sidewalk, etc?
- zamalek 9y ago
  You're right. It's a terrible idea. Pity it's too late to edit or delete that dumb comment.
Diederich 9y ago
I'm not going to dismiss your opinion out of hand, though I certainly don't agree with it. If I may: do you realize that, in this catastrophic wreck, that the fire only started, slowly, after the driver had been taken by EMS? One big difference between a fire with batteries and gas is this: if gas starts to burn, most likely all of it is going to burn, quickly and often explosively. None of these are the case with the batteries in Teslas. Only the damaged ones are likely to burn, slowly, and not explosively.

userbinator 9y ago

Walter took it into dealership addressing the issue, but they couldn't duplicate it there Why not get a mechanic to ride along with him to that location, perhaps with extra diagnostic equipment connected? I could see how a bug that is dependent upon being at that location would certainly not be reproducible somewhere else. Here's an automotive service booklet from almost 70 years ago which recommends the same thing for troubleshooting: http://www.imperialclub.com/Repair/Lit/Master/021/Page14.htm http://www.imperialclub.com/Repair/Lit/Master/021/Page14.htm

tytytytytytytyt 9y ago

He complained 7 - 10 times and then just forgot about how it used to swerve towards a head on collision with the median?

notafxn 9y ago

Super fun to compare the comments on this to the comments on the Uber accident.

FSharper 9y ago
Exactly. Lots of bias here. They aren’t deep thinkers.

anonytrary 9y ago

I can't believe this person kept using it. If I had noticed a bug in auto-pilot and complained about it, I would be way too scared to ever use auto-pilot again. Personally, I never use auto-pilot because driving is piss easy, as it's designed to be. Perfect self-driving cars is a nearly impossible feat to accomplish in an unbounded track. I can only imagine automated driving in a system which has no room for error. Examples include: tunnels under the ground, chain links on the ground (as in trolleys, trains, etc.), or anything else that vastly reduces the entropy involved in driving. With self-driving cars on current roads, it will probably take years to get from 1% error to .1% error, and decades to get from .1% error to .01% error, which isn't even good enough. Perhaps it will take a century or longer to develop the required artificial intelligence to make self-driving cars perfect "enough". There's just too much room for unique problems to spawn. Bounding vehicle freedom seems to be the only way forward.

gameswithgo 9y ago
i admit i immediately thought it was suicide-life insurance scam.
WhompingWindows 9y ago
Your numbers about error percentiles don't make sense. Ideally, you'd want an outcome measure like fatalities per million miles, accidents per 100k miles, not "% error" which is vague. Furthermore, look at the actual data we have right now. SDC makers actually put out data in California about their "disengagement rate" which is how many time the human drivers took over from the software. Waymo have steadily increased that rate over the past few years, now they are driving many hours without disengagements. Look at the link below, page 4, you'll see they have 63 disengagements over 350k miles. That's 1 per 5.5k miles, so these cars are driving for days without a human takeover. They will not need their own infrastructure, that would be not be economically viable. They will go on the roads we have or they won't go at all. Tunnels are going to be reserved for high-density point-to-point travel, if the boring company or others ever get scale...
- anonytrary 9y ago
  Then let's add some perspective. You must be referring this[0] paper. If the average person puts on 1,000 miles per month[1], then that means they'd have to deal with disengagement (a mishap) at least twice a year, which is not acceptable for fully autonomous driving. I'm going to define a "fully autonomous vehicle" as "a vehicle which should not ever require me to sit in the front seat and control it under any conceivable circumstance". Put differently, I should be able to lay down for a nap in the back seat and wake up at my destination without any chance for disengagement during my entire lifetime. At the current rate of 1 mishap per 5,500miles, I would be dead after about 6 months. Assuming a human lives to 75 years (we should really be using 75years minus 16years, but it's unimportant), a lifetime of driving is about 1,000mi/mo x 12mo/yr x 75yr = 900,000 miles. I don't even want the probability of encountering a mishap to be once per lifetime, let alone once per 6 months. One mishap per 900,000 miles isn't enough, because, on average, I'd encounter one disengagement in my lifetime. Assuming we're striving for a world where 7 billion people can drive without a single incident in 75 years (a vast underestimate), we need the probability of a mishap to occur to be less than once per 7,000,000,000humans x 900,000mi/human = 63 x 10^14 miles. 1/5e3 is not even close to 1/6e15. We're talking about 12 orders of magnitude in our error rate. I'd say we're laughably far away from our goal. We've got a long way to go. [0] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/42aff875-7ab1-4115-a72a-97f6f24b23cc/Waymofull.pdf?MOD=AJPERES https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/42aff875-7ab1-4115... [1] https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/01/25/the-average-american-drives-this-much-each-year-ho.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/01/25/the-averag...

Skunkleton 9y ago

The fire seems pretty severe too. I wonder what caused the battery containment to fail?

SpaceEncroacher 9y ago

Crash victim? More like crash dummy, auto-pilot is raw.

lewis500 9y ago

I am pretty mystified why tesla is even running autopilot on their cars. They already have more demand than they can handle, and I don't think anyone buys a tesla because of the autopilot. They are opening themselves up to huge court claims at the same time they are low on money. Just keep running tests and maybe do a pilot for a few years. Isn't Waymo sort of in the lead right now? They aren't running their software on millions of vehicles but seem to be progressing okay. It seems all these companies are in a big rush and being slapdash. Maybe it's a disconnect between the engineers and the execs/shareholders. It doesn't even seem profit-driven...almost fear driven. ("we don't wanna be left behind.")

sseth 9y ago
It allows them to develop self driving technology without the expense of dedicated cars and paid drivers, and without any liability (because drivers take the risk).

animex 9y ago

The fact that it happened to him "several times" and not to others to me might indicate a specific hardware/sensor issue related to his vehicle. A sensor, slightly misaligned or not working to the same tolerance? Pure speculation, I know. Also the 200 trips/day refers to what? All Tesla vehicles? How about for his specific year & model and software version and configuration (both equipped and driver-defined)?

jaimex2 9y ago

They should rename autopilot to auto-scapegoat. There is zero information yet and its all everyone is jumping onto. Last week the same thing happened to a Tesla that wasn't even equipped with autopilot.

aerovistae 9y ago

I love Tesla to death and in most cases will defend them beyond the point of reason. But I took a test drive in a model S for the first time earlier this year and almost immediately noticed autopilot’s extremely unreliable behavior— it would swerve out of lanes in ordinary situations that should have been easy to handle. The second I saw that, hat was it: I would never use it again before many years of testing and improvement had taken place. No way am I gambling my life on a clearly incomplete feature just because it’s cool. Fuck that. Of course Tesla is fairly safe behind their disclaimers and warnings, and to be honest I think it may be impossible to develop such a system without putting it into the wild before it’s perfect. But for me, personally...I’ll let other people choose to be the Guinea pigs. The risks are all too obvious. Continuing to use the feature is very dangerous. Do it knowing this may very well happen to you.

modeless 9y ago
After Tesla dumped Mobileye for their own system a year or two ago, autopilot performance was worse. But in the past few weeks they supposedly pushed out an update that dramatically improved it, to the point that it's finally unambiguously better than the old Mobileye system. I still wouldn't trust it. I don't believe their current hardware has enough processing power to do the job. But it should be performing better now than even a few months ago.
empath75 9y ago
> Of course Tesla is fairly safe behind their disclaimers and warnings I don't think so. All it will take is a Tesla plowing into a sidewalk full of people, and no hand-wavy gesture at a license agreement is going to make the political and legal pressure go away.
kwhitefoot 9y ago
I have a 2015 Tesla model S and I have never seen the behaviour you describe. I use autostart a lot on the ground that it's good to have two of us paying attention.
- kwhitefoot 9y ago

saudioger 9y ago

Tesla is very very very bad with PR when something goes wrong. Their response to this is awful.

cube00 9y ago

It looks like Status: WORKSFORME won't cut it in this brave new world.

hedora 9y ago

Am I the only one that finds it odd that a human also ran into the same barrier within 24 hours of the crash? Perhaps Caltrans is partially to blame. (Full disclosure: Their incompetence almost killed me a few times back in my I-880 commuting days)

lazyjones 9y ago
> Am I the only one that finds it odd that a human also ran into the same barrier within 24 hours of the crash? Source? ABC7 says the previous crash was 11 days ago (DUI...), the barrier just wasn't fixed immediately. http://abc7news.com/automotive/exclusive-i-team-investigates-why-caltrans-didnt-fix-safety-barrier-before-tesla-driver-died-there/3280399/ http://abc7news.com/automotive/exclusive-i-team-investigates...

markmark 9y ago

I really don't like autopilot. It's good enough to make drivers trust it and not pay attention, but it's not good enough to not kill people when they do that. And when there's an accident Telsa come out and say "the system warned the driver to put their hands on the wheel" or something similar. Unless a car can 100% self drive drivers aids should require the driver to have hands on the wheel and be paying active attention at all times.

toast0 9y ago
This is part of why I haven't considered a Tesla. If I get into an collision in any other manufacturer's vehicle, the manufacturer's PR team won't impune my honor in the court of public opinion. It seems like the Tesla autopilot is very similar in capabilities to other manufacturers' active lane keeping, adaptive cruise control and active collision avoidance braking systems, however the marketing and user behavior is much different. There's no expectation that a Pacifica with all the bells and whistles is going to do a good job driving for you with no hands, but if somebody stops suddenly, it will too.
jackvalentine 9y ago
Googling surprisingly didn't give me a definitive answer on this - how long does autopilot let you go before warning, and then before stopping the car if you don't have your hands on the wheel?

WillPostForFood 9y ago

The path into the barrier looks a lot like a lane. https://imgur.com/a/iMY1x https://imgur.com/a/iMY1x And the old striping is lightly visible as well.

dixie_land 9y ago
looks like that would trick a human driver under certain lighting conditions. between Seattle and Bellevue a stretch of freeway looks just like that and trips me over every time
- cesarb 9y ago
  Either the same place or a nearby one (same pair of highways) did trick a human driver two years ago: https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/HAR1701.pdf https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/... "[...] when it entered and traveled in an unmarked gore area, rather than the intended high-occupancy-vehicle (HOV) lane, and collided with a crash attenuator. The 990-foot-long gore, with an unmarked inside area, separates the left exit HOV lane for State Route 85 from the US-101 HOV lane."
  - pacificmint 9y ago
    Not the same place nor nearby. From the picture on page 24 it's clear that this is the 85/101 interchange in south San Jose, about 20 miles away from the other 85/101 junction where the Tesla accident happened. The type of accident does seems comparable though.
- taneq 9y ago
  From the article, it sounds like people crash pretty regularly in exactly that spot.
r00fus 9y ago
I'm amazed that the barrier doesn't have yellow reflective striping or any of those sand barrel thingies.

jijojv 9y ago

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/apples-steve-wozniak-doesnt-believe-anything-elon-musk-or-tesla-say.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/apples-steve-wozniak-doesnt-... "Man you have got to be ready — it makes mistakes, it loses track of the lane lines. You have to be on your toes all the time," says Wozniak. "All Tesla did is say, 'It is beta so we are not responsible. It doesn't necessarily work, so you have to be in control.' "Well you that is kinda a cheap way out of it."

cup-of-tea 9y ago
Unlike people like Elon and Jobs, you can safely calibrate your bullshit meter with Woz. He's not as famous because the press don't generally like that.

pmarreck 9y ago

IMHO, they need to get autopilot at least an order of magnitude better than human drivers statistically, before releasing this tech, because this sort of news is extremely bad public-perception-wise. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect a Tesla driver to always have his hands on the wheel during autopilot

godelmachine 9y ago

"Autopilots performance is unrelated to navigation" Tesla is mincing words.

Maro 9y ago

It's interesting nobody is asking why the crash attenuator was not replaced faster.

sjg007 9y ago

Certainly CalTrans is responsible for not replacing the barrier. Expect a lawsuit/settlement. Tesla will be found liable too, that’ll be a jury trial civil suit. Why? Despite reporting that AP failed at that interchange and despite still using it, drivers and juries expect safety features to work as advertised.

static_noise 9y ago
The autopilot is not a safety feature.

Bombthecat 9y ago

Side story, I have an open with crash warning. On a highway I think it even detects crashes ahead of you ( had once two cars in a three lane almost crashing while one car tried to switch Lanes) Well, back to story. I have a street where cars park left and right of the street like a zick Zack. There is one spot where it always warns me about a crash..

raverbashing 9y ago

The question is, if the driver was aware the autopilot was unsafe at that area, why did they keep using autopilot there? You can't just throw your hands on the air and hope for the best. Your car, you are on the wheel, you are responsible.

mdekkers 9y ago

before the crash, Walter complained "7-10 times the car would swivel toward that same exact barrier during auto-pilot ...and after 7 to 10 times , he still didn't learn his lesson? That's pretty stupid if you ask me. If my car does something weird at a particular stretch of road, especially 7 to 10 times, you can bet your bananas that i'll be paying a lot of attention on that stretch of road. If my "autopilot" (seriously, Tesla should stop using that name) isn't reliable in certain circumstances or places, then - guess what? - I WONT BE USING IT THERE. Why blame Tesla (I'm no Tesla fan), when the operator of the vehicle refused to operate it properly in the face of prior experience? Poor guy, and I feel for his family, but come on, what a dumbass

dotsh 9y ago

Why no one talks about other victims of car accidents and their is about 6k per month on average in US alone. But Uber and Tesla are on headlines when someone dies and there is like what 3-4 victims in total after all those years? It is not even worth mentioning.

randomblob 9y ago
I'd argue it is worth mentioning. People (rightfully) expect "Autopilot" systems to be perfect. Perfect meaning no fatal crashes, leading to passenger deaths.
vasilipupkin 9y ago
Miles driven, genius. There are millions of other vehicles on the road and not that many teslas

sabujp 9y ago

blame the customer, blame the govt, but your software is perfect Tesla?!

icc97 9y ago

Is there a specific system for traffic sign detection? I'd have thought you could have a system that is dedicated to spotting traffic signs in the current country with a significantly higher accuracy than cat detection. Even a small part of a sign should be enough. They're designed to be easy to spot. It seems like we just set neural networks up to recognise all objects and assume they'll recognise simple objects too. However typically how humans learn is through simple cartoons first and then layer on top of that rather than the other way round. Edit: should have done some googling before opening my mouth [0] [1] [0]: https://amundtveit.com/2017/07/13/traffic-sign-detection-with-convolutional-neural-networks/ https://amundtveit.com/2017/07/13/traffic-sign-detection-wit... [1]: http://www.bartlab.org/Dr.%20Jackrit's%20Papers/ney/1.TRAFFIC_SIGN_Lorsakul_ISR.pdf http://www.bartlab.org/Dr.%20Jackrit's%20Papers/ney/1.TRAFFI...